1

The capability approach

Ingrid Robeyns (June 2015, pre-copyediting)

Forthcoming in Serena Olsaretti (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice, OUP,

Abstract

This chapter analyses the contribution of the capability approach to the literature on

distributive justice. The capability approach in itself does not provide a full theory of

distributive justice, but rather argues that the metric of distributive justice should be

functionings and/or capabilities. The chapter critically analyses various issues that need

addressing when we adopt this metric, such as the questions which capabilities should be

selected, and how they should be aggregated in order to make interpersonal comparisons of

advantage. Comparisons with other metrics of justice are also discussed, such as Rawls’

social primary goods and welfarist metrics. The chapter concludes by arguing that we should

think of the capability approach to justice as a family of theories, and describes which

theoretical modules are needed for a full capabilitarian theory of justice.

Keywords:

Functionings, capabilities, capability approach, metric of justice, Martha Nussbaum, John

Rawls, Amartya Sen.

 

2

1. Introduction

The capability approach forms one of the most recent additions to the landscape of theories of

distributive justice.1 Although some of the central notions of the capability approach can be

traced back to Aristotle, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, in the contemporary literature on

distributive justice the notion of capabilities was first suggested in Amartya Sen’s 1979

Tanner Lecture (Sen, 1980). In that lecture Sen asked the famous ‘equality of what?’

question: assuming we advocate a form of equality, what kind of good should be equalized?

In other words, what should the ‘metric’ or ‘currency’ (Cohen, 1989) of egalitarianism be?

While Sen coined the idea of capabilities in the specific discussion on equality, it soon

became understood as a proposal within theories of distributive justice more generally. Every

account of distributive justice has to put forward a metric of justice – the distribuendum with

which the account of distributive justice will be concerned; the claim of the capability

approach to distributive justice is that functionings and/or capabilities should be the metric of

justice.

Thirty-five years later, the capability approach is widely regarded as offering us an

alternative position on the metric of distributive justice, and a large literature has emerged

examining that view. This chapter will introduce that literature, point to some of the main

challenges that capabilitarian theories of distributive justice faces, and outline what needs to

be done if we want to further this literature.2 Yet before embarking on these tasks, it is

1   I   am   grateful   to   Sem   de  Maagt   and   Serena  Olsaretti   for   helpful   comments   on   an   earlier   draft   of   this  

chapter,  and  to  the  Netherlands  Organisation  of  Scientific  Research  (NWO)  for  research  funding.    

2  For  this  chapter,  I  partly  extent  some  earlier  attempts  at  explaining  and  commenting  upon  the  literature  

on  the  capability  approach  and  on  capabilitarian  theories  of  justice  in  particular  (Robeyns,  2011,  2013).    

 

3

important to preempt a common misunderstanding. On its most comprehensive interpretation,

the capability approach is not just a contribution to theories of distributive justice, where it

proposes a metric of justice. Instead, it scope is much wider, both in terms of the debates in

which it intervenes, as well as the disciplines where it plays a role. If one asks the question

what the capability approach precisely is, the answer often depends on the perspective from

which that question is asked. If one looks at the capability approach starting off from the

philosophical literature on distributive justice, one is tempted to understand the capability

approach as a theory of distributive justice – yet that is only one of the debates or literatures

in which the capability approach has been put forward.

In order to avoid this common misunderstanding, it may perhaps be helpful to make a

distinction between the capability approach, which is the general framework that is used in a

number of different disciplines for various purposes, and capability theories or capability

accounts, which use this approach for a particular purpose, such as to develop a theory of

well-being, poverty, or justice. This distinction is important, because a claim or an argument

made by a capability scholar could be either a claim about the capability approach or about

particular capability theories, which are developed in a particular debate (e.g. theories of

distributive justice, or development ethics, or welfare economics). In order to properly

understand a particular capabilitarian claim or argument, one needs to know what the exact

scope of the claim is. The distinction between the capability approach and capability theories

or accounts is also important because without understanding this distinction one cannot

understand how it can be consistent for a particular capability theorist to make claim A in one

article, and claim the denial of A in another article. Yet this can be consistent if claim A is

only valid for capability theory X, while one rejects claim A for capability theory Y, or for

the capability approach in general. For example, Amartya Sen has endorsed particular

 

4

selections of capabilities for particular empirical applications, but denies that there can be a

single selection of relevant capabilities for the capability approach in general. In contrast to

what some may think, Sen’s endorsement of both claims need not be inconsistent.

In the remainder of this chapter, however, we will focus only on the capability approach as an

intervention in the literature on social and distributive justice. After a brief introduction to

various metrics of justice and the role a metric of justice plays in a theory of justice (section

2), we turn to the metric of justice in the capability approach (section 3). Next we compare

the capability approach with John Rawls’s Justice as Fairness (section 4). In section 5 we

examine whether the capability approach is genuinely different from a welfarist metric. The

answer to that question is in part dependent on which the relevant capabilities are taken to be

(section 6) and how one judges a person’s overall level of advantage, which requires

aggregation (section 7). In the last section I will conclude that the theoretical resources of the

capability approach as it currently stands are not sufficient for a complete capability theory of

justice, but that additional aspects of a theory of justice need to be added. As a consequence,

various capability theories of justice are conceivable.

2. Distributive justice and the metric of justice

Richard Arneson (2010: 103) has presented the following metaphor that is helpful for

understanding theories of distributive justice in general, and for the specific claims that the

capability approach makes. A theory of distributive justice can be compared with an engine,

in which the capability approach provides only one part, or “module”. Not all theories of

justice have exactly the same modules, yet theories of distributive justice must specify at least

two things: a metric and a distributive rule. The “metric of justice” is the good possession of

which by individuals is to be compared when making statements of distributive injustices,

 

5

hence, the metric of justice identifies the dimensions in which the interpersonal comparisons

that are an integral part of claims of justice are made. The distributive rule specifies what

justice requires in terms of the distribution of that good between people. Typical distributive

rules are equality, sufficiency (a level that everyone should be situated above), or priority to

the worst off. Moreover, there are other modules that make up the full theory of distributive

justice, such as the grounds for its principles of justice, or a specification of the duties of

justice rather than merely the rights of justice (see section 7).

As Arneson (2010: 103-104) point outs, one of the theoretical difficulties of comparing the

capability approach to justice with other theories is that one limits the comparison to only one

module, whereas the comparison really requires an assessment of the entire engine. We can’t

make an overall comparison of, say, cars, by only comparing their wheels or their maximum

speed. Thus, while some political philosophers mistakenly think the capability approach is a

theory of equality or a theory of justice, the capability approach to distributive justice only

specifies a metric of justice, and hence a variety of capability theories are possible, depending

on the other modules that are integrated with it. Even if we grant that we are just comparing

different metrics, the question is whether that can be done in a sound way if we don’t know

what the other characteristics of the theory of distributive justice are, e.g. what its scope,

domain and meta-ethical commitments are. It may well be the case that we find one metric

the most plausible for a theory of distributive justice with scope A, domain B and meta-

ethical commitments C and D, whereas another metric is more convincing for a theory with

characteristics scope E, domain F, and meta-ethical commitments G and H. This potential

complication is often ignored in debates on the metric of distributive justice. In this chapter

these issues will only be mentioned briefly. Nevertheless, more research on which modules

 

6

and which meta-ethical commitments can be put together coherently and plausibly would be

a worthwhile line of further research.

3. Functionings, capabilities, and the metric of justice

Capability theories of justice claim that when making interpersonal comparisons of

‘advantage’ as part of a judgment of justice, we should focus on people’s functionings and/or

capabilities. Let us first look at how functionings and capabilities are defined, then look at the

reasons for choosing functionings and capabilities as the metric of justice, and finally address

the question whether the capabilitarian metric of justice should be functionings or capabilities

or both.

Functionings are “beings and doings,” that is, various states of human beings and activities

that a person can undertake. Examples are being well-nourished, being undernourished, being

educated, being illiterate, being part of a supportive social network, being part of a criminal

network, being depressed, travelling, caring for a child, voting in an election, taking part in a

debate, taking drugs, killing animals, and eating animals. To every functioning corresponds a

capability, which is the real opportunity one has to achieve that functioning. If we say that

person A has a capability to obtain functioning X, we are saying that if A chooses to (be or

do) X, then A will succeed to (do or be) X. Hence, capabilities stand to functionings as an

opportunity stands to outcome, or the potential stands to the realized.

Capabilities can also be understood as freedoms or opportunities – yet when they are

described as freedoms, this almost always comes with the qualifiers real or genuine or

effective. By using the term effective, two aspects of the freedom notion of capabilities is

stressed (Olsaretti, 2005). First, describing capabilities as effective freedoms contrasts

capabilities with merely formal freedoms. Second, “freedom is “effective” in the sense that a

 

7

person is said to have her freedom increased “in effect” when someone does something to her

or for her which she would choose to have done to her or for her if given the chance, even if

she does not actually choose that.” (Olsaretti, 2005: 91)

In the earlier literature on the capability approach, capabilities have often been defined as

valuable doings or beings. For example, Sen described the capability approach as “a

particular approach to well-being and advantage in terms of a person’s ability to do valuable

acts or reach valuable states of being” (1993: 31, emphasis added). This value-laden

interpretation of the notion of functionings and capabilities is widespread among capability

scholars, especially outside philosophy. Yet there is also a value-neutral sense, which defines

functionings as beings and doings – without thereby restricting them to valuable beings and

doings. One could be tempted to think that this is merely a semantic difference: either we

define functionings as beings and doings, or else as valuable beings and doings. However,

there are reasons to think that the choice for the value-neutral versus the value-laden

interpretation of the notion ‘functioning’, and hence also of ‘capability’, is more then merely

a semantic issue. It can be argued that a value-neutral interpretation is superior, since it

makes much more explicit the need to decide which functionings are relevant, and which are

not. A value-neutral conceptualization of ‘functioning’ and ‘capability’ can also allow for

functionings that have a negative value, which would certainly be the case for many forms of

harms that we can suffer through injustices. Moreover, a value-laden interpretation would

make it very hard to know what to call a being or a doing that is arguably not valuable, such

as, say, counting blades of grass. In terms of the various metrics of justice, which will be

discussed at greater length in the next sections, it is clear that “counting blades of grass”

cannot be understood as a resource, nor is it reducible to a mental state (as in the case of

welfare and happiness). But what is it, then? On a value-neutral understanding of

 

8

functionings, we have no difficulty in describing “counting blades of grass” as a functioning,

albeit a functioning which may not be worth protecting, or which most likely will not be a

concern for social justice. So while it is important, when reading across the capability

literature, to take note of the fact that ‘functioning’ and hence also ‘capability’ are used in

both value-laden and value-neutral ways, this chapter will discuss the concepts as being

value-neutral.3

What reasons are there to focus on the evaluative space of functionings and capabilities,

rather than other possible metrics of justice, such as resources or welfare? The capability

approach is motivated by a number of commitments, which lead to its rejection of resources

and welfare as the metric of justice. The first commitment is what Carter (2014: 81-82) calls

the anti-fetishist move. This is the concern that judgments of justice should focus on what is

intrinsically valuable to people, rather than what is instrumentally valuable. For the capability

approach, functionings and/or capabilities are intrinsically valuable, whereas resources are

merely instrumentally valuable. Rephrased in terminology that is often used in the capability

literature and by Sen in particular, we should focus on the ends rather than the means of well-

being, and the capability approach postulates that these ends are what people are able to be

and to do. The anti-fetishism commitment leads to the rejection of resourcist theories such as

Ronald Dworkin’s (1981b), and, to some extent, also John Rawls’s theory of justice (see

section 4 below). Still, it is important to acknowledge that in those theories of justice the

accounts of resources are still relatively broad, while in philosophical work on justice in a

particular domain or the corresponding institutional analysis (think of recent work on basic

3   Ian   Carter   (2014)   discusses   some   implications   of   the   value-­‐laden   interpretation   of   the   notion  

‘functioning’  for  the  ability  of  a  capability  theory  of  justice  to  avoid  paternalism.    

 

9

income or on property-owning democracy), the definition of resources often further narrows

to financial resources. The anti-fetishist commitment of the capability approach is certainly a

rejection of the latter as the relevant metric of justice, without necessarily denying the

instrumental value of those resources.

A second commitment of the capability approach is to human diversity. For the capability

approach, the problem with resources as a metric of justice is not only that those are the

means to living, but also that people differ in their ability to convert means into valuable

opportunities (capabilities) or outcomes (functionings) (Sen 1992: 26-28, 36-38). Since ends

are what ultimately matters when thinking about well-being and the quality of life, means can

only work as reliable proxies of people’s opportunities to achieve those ends if all people

have the same capacities or powers to convert those means into equal capability sets.

Capability scholars believe that these inter-personal differences are far-reaching and

significant, and that theories that focus on means tend to downplay their normative relevance.

The sources of inter-individual differences to convert means into ends can be personal (e.g.

impairments), social (e.g. social norms) or environmental (e.g. living in an area affected by

malaria). However, as we shall see in the following sections, the core normative commitment

of the capability approach to take into account (at least to some extent) people’s inter-

personal differences results in certain redistributive effects that are not beyond criticism.

A final point we need to address is whether the metric of justice is functionings, or the

genuine access to those functionings (i.e. capabilities), or both. Functionings are

achievements, whereas capabilities are opportunities; hence, the question can be rephrased in

terms of an old debate in political theory, namely whether we want the capability account of

distributive justice to be an outcome or an opportunity theory, that is, whether we think that

we should assess injustices in terms of functionings, or rather in terms of capabilities, or

 

10

some combination of the two. At the level of theory and principles, most theorists of justice

endorse the view that justice is done if all have equal genuine opportunities, or if all reach a

minimal threshold of capability levels. Translated to the capability language, this would

imply that at the level of theory and principles, capabilities are the relevant metric of justice,

and not functionings. However, while most theorists defend opportunities rather than

outcomes, the focus on opportunities is not entirely uncontested (e.g. Fleurbaey 2002;

Phillips 2004; Wolff and De-Shalit 2007). Moreover, Claassen (2014) has argued that many

capabilities presuppose certain levels of achieved functionings (e.g. the capability to run for a

political office presupposes having achieved a minimal level of education), and hence a

capability theory that is worked out in sufficient detail will often include claims that some

minimum levels of achieved functionings are part of what justice requires.

4. Rawlsian justice and the capability approach

One common methodological practice in the theoretical literature on distributive justice (and

normative political theory/philosophy more generally) is that the strength of a theory is tested

by comparing it with other theories. This comparison of different theories is part and parcel

of what happens in this literature. Yet there is seldom a systematic justification for why

theory X is compared with theory Y and not with some other theories. In the case of the

capability approach, we can observe that philosophers defending the capability approach

have most explicitly targeted John Rawls’s metric of justice, the “social primary goods”

(Nussbaum, 2006; Sen, 1980, 2009). I will first describe what arguments have been put

forward in the debate between Rawlsian theorists and capabilitarian theorists, and then return

to the question of whether this comparison is the most important one to be made if one wants

to test the capability approach to justice.

 

11

In his 1979 Tanner lecture entitled “Equality of What?” Sen (1980) argued that “the primary

goods approach seems to take little note of the diversity of human beings.” He continued:

If people were basically very similar, then an index of primary goods might be quite a

good way of judging advantage. But, in fact, people seem to have very different needs

varying with health, longevity, climatic conditions, location, work conditions,

temperament, and even body size. … So what is being involved is not merely

ignoring a few hard cases, but overlooking very widespread and real differences.

(Sen, 1980: 215-216)

Sen argues that Rawls’s difference principle would not justify any redistribution to the

disabled on grounds of disability. Rawls’s strategy has been to postpone the question of our

obligations towards the disabled, and exclude them from the scope of his theory. Rawls

certainly does not want to deny our moral duties towards the people that fall outside the

scope of his theory, but he thinks that we should first work out a robust and convincing

theory of justice for the “normal” cases and only then try to extend it to the “more extreme

cases” (Rawls, 2001: 176). Rawls stressed, especially in his later work, that in his theory

“everyone has physical needs and psychological capacities within the normal range,” and

therefore he excludes people with severe physical or mental disabilities from the scope of

justice as fairness (2001: 170-176). In his earlier work (Rawls 1971), Rawls justified the

restriction by arguing that a theory of justice should in any case apply for “normal cases” – if

the theory is inconsistent or implausible for such cases, then it will certainly not be an

attractive theory for the more challenging cases, such as people with severe disabilities. We

could postpone the question of how to treat people with disabilities to one of the later

(legislative) stages of the design of the basic structure of society, though, of course, even in

his earliest discussions of this issue Rawls thinks that a complete theory of justice must deal

 

12

adequately with the claims of people whose abilities fall outside the normal range, and that

any theory that cannot do so should be rejected on those grounds. In later work Rawls (2001:

176) no longer argues that the case of justice towards the disabled had to be postponed to the

legislative phase, but rather that we have to try to extend justice as fairness to include those

cases. Rawls has not pursued this task systematically himself, though he has emphasized the

role that his conception of the person possessed of the capacities for a sense of justice and a

conception of the good plays in developing that part of a theory of justice, and has argued

that this conception enables him to deflect accusations of “fetishism” about the primary

goods (Rawls, 2001: 176-8).

However, this doesn’t seem to provide a full response to Sen’s concerns in his Tanner lecture,

which was not only about the case of the severely disabled. Sen’s more general critique

concerned what he saw as the inflexibility of primary goods as a metric of justice. Sen

believes that the more general problem with the use of primary goods is that it cannot

adequately deal with the pervasive differences among people. Primary goods, he argues,

cannot adequately account for differences among individuals in their abilities to convert these

primary goods into what people are able to be and to do in their lives. Primary goods are

among the valuable means to pursue one’s life plan. However, the real opportunities or

possibilities that a person has to pursue her own life plan are not only influenced by the

primary goods that she has at her disposal, but also by a range of factors that determine to

what extent she can use these primary goods to generate valuable states of being and doing.

Hence, Sen claims that we should focus on the extent of substantive freedom that a person

effectively has, i.e. her capabilities. Sen sometimes adds that functionings, too, may need to

be taken into account. The vagueness in his defense for a particular metric of justice (in this

case: is the metric of justice comprised of capabilities, functionings or both?) reflects Sen’s

 

13

meta-theoretical commitment to let questions of justice be decided by social choice

procedures, rather than by theorizing only (Sen, 2009).

A more recent wave of philosophical enquiry has highlighted how complex the comparisons

between Rawls’s theory of justice and the capability view are (Pogge, 2002; Richardson,

2006; Robeyns, 2009; Brighouse and Robeyns, 2010). One reason is that the capability

metric is a general metric of well-being freedom, whereas the social primary goods metric

emerges as one element of an integral and complex theory of institutional justice (rather than

social justice more broadly, let alone the even wider category of moral evaluations). Also,

Rawls’s theory of justice is an ideal theory of justice since it tries to outline the conditions of

a completely just (yet “realistic”) utopia, which the currently developed capability accounts

do not aspire to do. This means that it is very hard to compare Rawls’s work on justice with

the existing philosophical work on the capability approach, since their scope and theoretical

aims are not the same (Robeyns, 2009, 2011).

Regarding scope, Rawls’s theory of justice is limited to (1) the basic structure of society (that

is, the set of most important social institutions), (2) to liberal democratic societies rather than

also to nondemocratic and illiberal societies, (3) and to the principles of justice insofar as

they apply to people in their capacity as citizens. The scope of the capability approach can be

summarized as “justice applies everywhere” – that is, it applies to all human beings

independently of their country of birth or residence, and not only to public institutions but

also to the social ethos and to social practices.

Regarding theoretical aims, one can safely say that most capability scholars tend to disfavor

top-down theorizing, and prefer to find out how theory or philosophy can help us make the

actual world, a social institution or a practice, more just, rather than to work more abstractly

on the principles of justice and their justification. This last difference has been a main point

 

14

of attention in Sen’s more recent work (Sen, 2009). Still, it does not follow that this

methodological preference for bottom-up theorizing is a necessary or inevitable characteristic

of a capabilitarian theory of justice.

Rawlsians have criticized the capability approach too, and not all of their critiques have been

sufficiently rebutted (Pogge, 2002; Kelly, 2010). Firstly, it is claimed that the capability

approach is endorsing a particular comprehensive moral view, which Rawlsians find

objectionable. Rawls aims to stay away from a perfectionist account of justice, and the

question is whether this is possible for a capability theory of justice. This is an important area

of dispute, to which we will return briefly in section 6.

Another main Rawlsian objection to the capability approach concerns the publicity criterion,

which stipulates that the conception of justice must be public and the necessary information

to make a claim of injustice must be verifiable by all and be easily accessible. Rawlsians

argue that a theory of justice needs a public standard of interpersonal comparisons, as

otherwise the obtained principles of justice among citizens with diverse conceptions of the

good life will not prove stable. The suggestion is that as capabilities are very hard to measure

or assess in such a public fashion, and as assessing whether one has them would require very

large amounts and difficult to assess information, the capability approach is unworkable as a

theory of justice. Not everyone agrees that this is a valid complaint. For example, Elizabeth

Anderson (2010: 85) has argued that the capabilities metric does meet the publicity criterion,

while Richard Arneson (2010: 114) has argued that concerns of justice overrule concerns of

publicity: if social justice can only be achieved by relying on measures that violate the

publicity criterion, then that is a price worth paying.

This brief overview of the debate between Rawls’s defense of social primary goods as the

metric of justice and capabilitarian justice shows that a large literature has emerged between

 

15

these two accounts of justice. There are plausible historical reasons to explain this, related to

the fact that Rawls’s theory of justice is often seen as the most influential contemporary

account, in addition to the fact that the two most prominent capabilitarian theorists – Sen and

Nussbaum – picked out Rawlsian justice as their target for comparison. Yet one could

wonder whether this is really where the action should be. Rawls’s theory of justice has much

in common with the capability approach, and quite plausibly much more than with utilitarian

accounts of justice, or with purely material-resource accounts or accounts that defend

subjective welfare as the metric. Rawlsian justice and the capability approach both see

persons as agents, and as human beings living in a relational context (in the capability

approach, this is captured by including a range of ‘social capabilities’, in justice as fairness,

by arguing for the social basis of self-respect as the most important social primary good).

This is not to deny that there are significant disagreements between those two theories, which

have been highlighted above – such as the degree to which interpersonal diversity has to be

taken into account (e.g. as in the case of disabilities). Yet it is also instructive that some

philosophers have argued that the conceptual differences between social primary goods and

capabilities are not that big, and that one way to see them is as complementary metrics of

justice (Richardson, 2006). Social primary goods are not necessarily incompatible with

capabilities, and there is even some degree of overlap, especially in those social primary

goods that are opportunities. Capabilitarian accounts of justice and Rawls’s theory of justice

are thus much less theoretical opponents as the intensity of this debate has suggested.

Social primary goods are only one possible metric of justice with which capabilities and

functionings can be compared. One surprising observation is that relatively little attention has

been paid comparing functionings and capabilities as the metric of justice with subjectivist

metrics, such as happiness or ‘welfare’. One may wonder: can the capability approach escape

 

16

the criticism of welfarism, or is it, upon closer considerations, a form of welfarism in

disguise, as Dworkin (2002) has claimed?4

5. Capabilities, welfare and happiness

Welfarist metrics of justice use mental states or subjective judgments as the relevant metric.

They come in a variety of forms, from classical hedonism (with its focus on the balance of

pleasures and pains) to views of happiness understood as overall satisfaction with life, to

views that take welfare to be preference fulfillment. In all those cases, a person’s level of

‘advantage’ cannot be assessed from the position of an outsider, but depends on the mental

states of the person.

In his highly influential paper ‘Equality of Welfare’, Dworkin (1981a) argues against welfare

as a metric of justice whereby one of the grounds is that it does not hold people responsible

for their ‘ambitions’. If Lisa wants to be a professional piano player and needs an expensive

education and an expensive piano to practice and perform, whereas Karen wants to be a

childminder for which she can train with a much cheaper education, then why would Lisa, on

grounds of justice, be entitled to more resources than Karen in order to fulfill her ambitions?

This should be worrying for the capability approach, since ‘being a piano player’ and ‘being

4  Dworkin’s  criticism  of  Sen’s  capability  approach  was  phrased  differently,  namely  as  the  claim  that  the  

capability  approach  has   to  boil  down  to  either  equality  of   (Dworkinian)  resoures,  or  else  as  equality  of  

welfare.  For  arguments  that  capabilities  do  not  necessarily  collapse  into  either  resources  or  welfare,  see  

Williams  (2002)  and  Pierik  and  Robeyns  (2006).  In  this  chapter  we  will  proceed  on  the  assumption  that  

capabilities  do  not  necessarily  have  to  collapse  into  either  resources  or  welfare,  but  rather  investigate  the  

conditions  under  which  it  can  avoid  becoming  welfarist.    

 

17

a childminder’ are functionings (capabilities that a person has realized). If the capability

approach advocates equality of capabilities, then the person with the expensive preference

(becoming a piano player) will need many more resources than the person who does not have

such expensive preferences (becoming a childminder).

Interestingly enough, many capabilitarians have argued against subjective metrics based on

arguments that are to some extent similar to the expensive preference objection: the ‘adaptive

preference objection’. This objection states that welfare (happiness, satisfaction) as the metric

of justice legitimizes a distribution whereby very little is given to those persons who have

learnt to become satisfied with little – such as the lower class in class societies, the women in

sexist societies, or the Dalits in caste societies. If we equalize welfare, these oppressed groups

will get less than their fair share because they have been conditioned to be satisfied with less,

so the argument goes.

Sen and Nussbaum have said very little on the problem of expensive taste – possibly since

their concerns have primarily been with questions of justice for the poorest and guaranteeing

minimal levels of capabilities for all. Anderson (2010: 85-87) has addressed the question of

both adaptive preferences and expensive taste, and used these as arguments against welfarist

metrics of justice. For Anderson, metrics of justice should be objective, and she claims that

one strength of the capability approach is that it is an objective metric of justice.

But the question is whether that is true: is the capabilitarian metric of justice an objective

metric? That depends on which capabilities are selected as the relevant dimensions. It is

possible to select only capabilities to obtain objectively valuable state of being and doing

other than mental states. If one were to add ‘the capability of feeling happy’ as a capability

that is relevant for matters of justice, one would go beyond an objective metric. Sen has

repeatedly states that the capability to be happy is “a major aspect of the freedom that we

 

18

have good reason to value” (Sen, 2009: 276). However, this is best to be interpreted as a

statement about the capability of feeling happy being a relevant capability for capability

accounts and theories that are not about justice (e.g. capability accounts about the decisions

we make that affect our own well-being) (Sen, 2009: 282-284). In other words, one plausible

reading of Sen’s view is that happiness matters, but not for matters of justice. This

underscores the importance, which was highlighted in section 1, of the distinction between

the capability approach and the (more specific) capability accounts and theories. Happiness is

a functioning, and its corresponding capability may be relevant, but not as a matter of justice.

However, the above doesn’t fully respond to Dworkin’s worry that some accounts of

distributive justice are not sensitive to differences in people’s ambitions. Can the capability

approach answer Dworkin’s worry? As will be explained in section 7, this depends on what

the distributive rule is that a particular capability theory of justice defends. The upshot is that

the capability approach can be developed in a range of capabilitarian theories of justice, and

that whether that more specific theory is prone to Dworkin’s objections depends on the

selection of capabilities, as well as on the distributive rule and method of aggregating. We

will discuss these two challenges in turn.

6. Which capabilities are relevant for justice?

A major challenge for a capability theory of justice is the question of which capabilities

matter. In answering this question, philosophers have had two different notions of justice in

mind. One sees the question of justice as a question about truth, sharply distinguished from

questions about implementation, justice-enhancing policies, feasibility, and other practical

concerns. G.A. Cohen (2008) is an important representative of this line of work. However,

very few articles analyzing or defending the capability approach to justice take this line. An

 

19

exception is Peter Vallentyne (2005), who argues that all functionings should be included

when considering issues of justice. According to Vallentyne (2005: 362), “given that any

functioning could, under some circumstances, enhance (or otherwise affect) the quality of

someone’s life, it is a mistake to exclude some functionings from consideration. To do so

would leave out something that is relevant for justice.” However, Vallentyne adds that this is

not to deny that when designing policies, we need to select the most important capabilities.

Since virtually all capability theorists implicitly or explicitly understand “justice” as a

practical concept, that is, as a concept that will help us determine what we ought to do or how

we ought to shape social institutions, they take some (minimal) feasibility constraints into

account. Those working in a more practical line of political philosophy have argued that

considerations of justice require that we demarcate morally relevant from morally irrelevant

and morally bad capabilities (Nussbaum, 2003; Pogge, 2002; Pierik and Robeyns, 2007). Put

differently, any capability account of justice will have to tell us which capabilities are

relevant and which are not for purposes of justice.

Amartya Sen (2004, 2009: 242-243) has notoriously refused to answer this question, claiming

that processes of public reasons and democratic deliberation should lead to the selection of

relevant capabilities. Yet this “democratic route” to selecting the relevant capabilities

requires a specific account of the deliberative processes that are needed, and that specific

account has not been provided by Sen. While several capability theorists have debated issues

of democratic deliberation in the context of development questions or other policy decisions,

within the context of distributive justice this work remains to be done.

The second way to select the relevant capabilities for the purpose of justice is the “criteria

route,” whereby the criteria that the selected capabilities should meet are proposed and

defended. A prominent example of the “criteria route” is Elizabeth Anderson’s (1999) theory

 

20

of democratic equality. Anderson (1999: 316), who aims to develop the outline of a political

theory of justice (rather than a theory of social justice that encompasses all spheres of life),

argues that people should be entitled “to whatever capabilities are necessary to enable them

to avoid or escape entanglement in oppressive social relationships” and “to the capabilities

necessary for functioning as an equal citizen in a democratic state,” without giving a

complete list of which capabilities meet these criteria.

The third way to select the relevant capabilities for the purpose of justice is the “objective-list

route.” Following Derek Parfit’s notion of objective list theories, which are theories claiming

that “certain things are good or bad for us, whether or not we want to have the good things, or

to avoid the bad things” (Parfit, 1984: 493), the capability theorist proposes an objective list

of well-being which will be the concern of distributive justice. Richard Arneson (2010)

defends this version of the capability approach, which he dubs the “perfectionist capability

theory” – without, however, specifying an account of well-being in terms of an objective list.

Martha Nussbaum’s (2000, 2006, 2011) minimal theory of justice is the best-known version

of the capabilities approach that relies on an objective list of well-being. Nussbaum’s theory

of social justice is comprehensive, in the sense that it is not limited to an account of political

justice, or to liberal democracies. Rather, her account holds for all human beings,

independently of where they are living or what their particular needs are. The main

demarcation of Nussbaum’s account is that it provides only “a partial and minimal account of

social justice” (Nussbaum, 2006: 71) by specifying thresholds of a list of capabilities that

governments in all nations should guarantee to their citizens. Nussbaum’s theory focuses on

thresholds, but this does not imply that reaching these thresholds is all that matters for social

justice; rather, her theory is partial and simply leaves unaddressed the question of what social

justice requires once those thresholds are met. Nussbaum’s well-known list contains

 

21

capabilities that are grouped together under ten “central human capabilities”: life; bodily

health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination and thought; emotions; practical reason;

affiliation; other species; play; and control over one’s environment (Nussbaum, 2006: 76-8;

2011: 33-4).

Nussbaum (2000: 70-77; 2006: 78-81) justifies her list by arguing that each of these

capabilities is needed in order for a human life to be “not so impoverished that it is not

worthy of the dignity of a human being” (2000: 72). She defends these capabilities as being

the moral entitlements of every human being on earth. She formulates the list at an abstract

level and argues that the translation to implementation and policies should be done at a local

level, taking into account local differences. Nussbaum argues that this list can be derived

from a Rawlsian overlapping consensus and stresses that her list remains open-ended and

always open for revision (Nussbaum, 2000: 77), yet other philosophers have taken issue with

her claim that this would result in a form of political liberalism, claiming that she is a

perfectionist liberal and cannot avoid paternalism after all (Barclay, 2003).

The question of perfectionism and paternalism is one that does not only affect Nussbaum,

since many critics have raised doubts whether the capability approach can avoid

perfectionism and paternalism at all (e.g. Nelson, 2008; Carter, 2014; Claassen, 2014). Even

if we grant that capability theories of justice should only be concerned with capabilities rather

than functionings, and we bracket –for the sake of the argument– Claassen’s (2014) point that

many capabilities require minimal levels of other functionings, we are still left with the fact

that, on the capability view, some citizens will be required to support the capabilities of their

fellow citizens which go against their own ideas of the good life (Nelson, 2008). The usual

response by capability theorists that citizens are not forced into functioning but are merely

offered the capability will not do. Why would Andrea need to fund access to university

 

22

education of some of her co-citizens, if Andrea endorses a notion of the good in which the

good life requires merely basic education combined with a lot of hands-on learning on the

job, and moreover higher education is considered a ‘bad’, both for individuals and for society

(e.g. because it threatens the innocent souls of students and corrupts their character)? Yet if

Andrea’s notion of the good is not regarded as unreasonable, and the capability account of

justice requires the state to provide the effective freedom to higher education, than Andrea

will have to contribute, via the coercive nature of taxation, to the funding needed for making

higher education accessible. Nelson (2008) concludes that there is no way in which the

capability approach can be neutral.

7. Aggregation and the distributive rule

The selection of relevant capabilities is one major challenge for the capability approach to

justice. Another is the question of how to aggregate the different capabilities that are judged

to be relevant for justice. If judgments of justice require us to make interpersonal

comparisons of people’s overall freedom to achieve well-being, don’t we need a way to

aggregate the value of the different capabilities into an overall value? In order for us to be

able to judge whether person A is better off than person B, and to decide whether this

constitutes a matter of injustice, we do need to make interpersonal comparisons at an

aggregated level. For such interpersonal comparisons we need to choose a metric, which we

discussed in the previous section. In the case of multidimensional metrics of justice, such as

Rawls’s social primary goods, Dworkinian resources, or capabilities, we also need a

mechanism to aggregate the various dimensions, as well as a distributive rule to decide which

distributions of the aggregated metric of justice constitute injustice. Clarity on these matters

is needed if we want to compare theories of distributive justice, and assess their plausibility.

 

23

Unfortunately, the literature on capabilitarian justice is remarkably silent on these questions.

There are some proposals for aggregating capabilities either using social choice procedures

(Chakraborty, 1996) or else equating the value of a capability by its contribution to a person’s

happiness (Schokkaert, 2007), but these are made in the context of welfare economics, rather

than as part of assessing justice. Amartya Sen deliberately refuses to investigate the question

how such aggregation should or could be done, since he believes that the quest for

aggregation is driven by a concern for complete rankings. To Sen’s mind, striving for

complete rankings is a mistake (Sen, 2009).

The capability literature thus seems to leave us with empty hands. Nevertheless, the problem

of aggregating the dimensions of the metric of justice is of course relevant for all

multidimensional metrics of justice, including Rawls’s social primary goods metric and

Dworkin’s resource egalitarianism. Could the capability approach adopt the aggregation

mechanisms available in Dworkin’s or in Rawls’s theory?

On one interpretation of Rawls, the aggregation problem is an unsolved problem in his theory

of justice, since the social primary goods are noncommensurable. On another interpretation,

the social primary goods of basic liberties, opportunities and the social basis of self-respect,

will be distributed equally by Rawls’s first principle of justice (the principle of equal

liberties), implying that for distributive questions the relevant social primary goods reduce to

income and wealth (assuming the social basis of self-respect is best taken care of by the

realization of the principle of equal liberties). If it is problematic to reduce the full range of

social primary goods to only income and wealth, then there is no satisfactory solution to the

aggregation problem in Rawls’s theory of justice either. So the problem of aggregating would

then be a problem not only for capability theories of justice, but also for the social primary

goods metric.

 

24

Dworkin (1981b) proposes the so-called “envy-test” to make comparisons between the

“resources” that people hold, which in Dworkin’s conceptualization includes not only their

material possessions and leisure time, but also their skills, talents and handicaps. The

distributive rule that Dworkin defends is equality: we should all have an equal amount of

resources, and the envy test can tell us whether that ideal of equality is met or not. If one is

willing to take a pill to trade with the place of another person, taking the entire “package

deal” of their life, one has a justified complaint that one has not received one’s fair share in

life. However, while Dworkin’s envy test may be a useful heuristic device, the envy test

entails impossible epistemological requirements, and operates against a number of

background assumptions that make Dworkin’s theory highly idealized (Pierik and Robeyns,

2007). Those background assumptions put Dworkin’s theory in highly idealized

circumstances, in which there are no preference formation mechanisms, unjust social norms,

or legacies of racism, sexism and other forms of systematic bias against groups. In those

circumstances, it is possible to adopt the Dworkinian envy test for a capability theory of

justice, although so far it hasn’t been analysed whether that would provide us with a plausible

capabilitiarian account of justice. In any case, the point which capability theorists of justice

should take home is that a principle of fairness, such as Dworkinian envy test, will have to be

developed if one wants the capability metric to do the work of a complete theory of

distributive justice.

A capability theory of justice that endorses sufficiency as the distributive rule, such as Martha

Nussbaum’s theory (2000, 2006, 2011), can avoid the problem of aggregation, since such a

theory specifies that justice requires only that all people meet a certain threshold level for

each capability. Nevertheless, even such a theory has two major problems to solve. First, we

will need to know where the thresholds are set, or by which procedure or which foundational

 

25

principles determine the thresholds. Ultimately, the normative decisions that confront the

selection of relevant capabilities re-emerge here, albeit in a slightly different guise. Secondly,

in an unjust world, the theory of transitional justice or the non-ideal theory of justice will

need to tell us which capability to prioritize if not all people are above the thresholds of all

relevant capabilities. Should we prioritize education, health, or being able to hold a decent

job? Nussbaum (2011: 37-38) has argued that the impossibility to get all people above the

thresholds for all capabilities involves a tragic choice, which should prompt us to ask the

question of how we can work towards a future where this is no longer the case. For

Nussbaum, this strategy will be sufficient, since “If the whole list has been wisely crafted and

the thresholds set at a reasonable level, there usually will be some answer to that question.”

(Nussbaum, 2011: 38) One could wonder whether this response really solves the problem:

many of the one billion most deprived people on Earth are below reasonable thresholds on

most of the capabilities on Nussbaum’s list. Which capabilities should justice-seeking

organizations or governments prioritize?

8. A family of capabilitarian theories of justice

The capability approach is often taken to be an egalitarian theory or a theory of social or

distributive justice. While it is true that the capability approach can be developed into a

theory or account of justice, it only provides one aspects of such an account (or a “module”,

to use Arnesons’ terminology introduced in section 2). The account provided is the metric of

justice, hence a clear claim on what should count for interpersonal evaluations for the

purpose of justice. However, additional modules are needed before one can speak of a theory

of justice. Nussbaum (2000, 2006, 2011) offers us a capability theory of justice, but her

theory too doesn’t amount to a full theory of social justice. Moreover, it would be a mistake

 

26

to think that there can be only one capability theory of justice; on the contrary, the open

nature of the capability approach allows for the development of a family of capability

theories of justice. But this prompts the question: what is needed to develop a full capability

theory of justice, and what other aspects of a theory of justice have already been developed

by capability theorists? Assuming that the capability theory of justice has addressed the

issues outlined above – that is, the choice for functionings, capabilities or both, the selection

of the relevant capabilities, and the question of aggregation – several other theoretical choices

remain to be made and defended (Robeyns, 2011).

First, a theory of justice needs to explain on what basis it justifies its principles or claims of

justice. For example, in Rawls’s theory of justice the two principles of justice are justified by

the thought-experiment of the original position and the more general social contract

framework on which this is based. Dworkin’s egalitarian justice theory starts from the meta-

principle of equal respect and concern, which Dworkin then argues supports the principles

that the distribution of burdens and benefits should be sensitive to the ambitions that people

have but should not reflect the unequal natural endowments with which individuals are born.

One could also develop a capability theory of justice arguing that the ultimate driving force is

a concern with autonomy or with human dignity, or with human vulnerability, or perhaps a

combination of these. If capability scholars want to develop a full theory of justice, they will

also need to explain on what bases they will justify their principles or claims. As mentioned

earlier, Nussbaum starts from a notion of human dignity, whereas the Senian strand in the

capability approach stresses the importance of what people have reason to value. Those

reasons are then put together in a collective (or public) account of public reasoning; this is,

ultimately, an account of justice that at its core has some strong procedural elements (or, to

put it in Sen’s preferred terminology, it is a social choice perspective on theorizing about

 

27

justice). However, little work has been done so far to flesh out Sen’s embryonic idea of

“having reason to value,” and it therefore remains unclear whether the capability approach

has a solid unified rationale on the basis of which a full account of justice could be

developed.

Second, a capability theory of justice needs to take a position on the “distributive rule” that it

will endorse: will it argue for plain equality, or for sufficiency, or for prioritarianism, or for

some other (mixed) distributive rule? Both Martha Nussbaum’s and Elizabeth Andersons’s

theories are sufficiency accounts (Anderson, 1999, 2010; Nussbaum, 2006), but from this it

does not follow, as one sometimes reads in the secondary literature, that the capability

approach entails a sufficiency rule. Sen may have given the (wrong) impression of defending

straight equality as a distributive rule, by asking the question “Equality of what?” (Sen,

1980), though a careful reading shows that he was merely asking the question “If we want to

be defending equality of something, then what would that be?” In fact, Sen has remained

uncommitted to one single distributive rule, which probably can be explained by the fact that

he is averse of building a well-defined theory of justice but rather prefers to investigate how

real-life unjust situations can be turned into more just situations, even if perfect justice is

unattainable (Sen, 2009). The capability approach clearly plays a role in Sen’s work on

justice, since when assessing a situation he will investigate inequalities in people’s

capabilities and analyze the processes that led to those inequalities. However, Sen has an

eclectic approach to theorizing, and hence other notions and theories (such as human rights or

more formal analyses of freedoms from social choice theory) also play a role in his work on

justice. The presence and importance of the capability approach in Sen’s work on justice is

thus undeniable, but should not be seen as the only defining feature.

 

28

Third, a capability theory of justice needs to specify where the line between individual and

collective responsibility is drawn, or how it will be decided, and by whom, where this line

will be drawn. There is a remarkable absence of much discussion about issues of

responsibility in the capability literature, in sharp contrast to political philosophy and welfare

economics where this is one of the most important lines of debate, certainly since the

publication of Ronald Dworkin’s (1981b) work on justice and equality, which led to what

Elizabeth Anderson (1999) has called “luck-egalitarianism.” An exception is Peter

Vallentyne (2005: 365), who has argued that the relevant metric of justice is “brute luck

capabilities,” these being the capabilities that one has a matter of brute luck only; those that

one has as a matter of option luck (that is, due to one’s own choices) are not a concern of

justice. While Vallentyne endorses a strict separation between theorizing about justice on the

one hand, and policy and institutional design on the other, the question of responsibility also

has important effects for the more practical approach to justice. Indeed, whether one wants to

discuss it explicitly or not, any concrete capability-based policy proposal can be analyzed in

terms of the division between personal and collective responsibility; but this terminology is

largely absent from the capability literature. There may be plausible explanations for why this

issue is not discussed in the capability literature, but if a capability theory of justice wants to

be applicable to questions of justice, then it cannot but confront the question about the just

division between personal and collective responsibility (Pierik and Robeyns, 2007: 148-9).

This brings us to a related issue: a theory of justice generally specifies rights, but also duties.

However, capability theorists have remained largely silent on the question of who should

bear the duties for securing the selected capabilities. Nussbaum passionately argues that all

people all over the world should be entitled, as a matter of justice, to threshold levels of all

the capabilities on her list; but apart from mentioning that it is the governments’ duties to

 

29

guarantee these entitlements (2006: 70), she remains silent on the question of who precisely

should bear the burdens and responsibilities for realizing these capabilities. Yet as Onora

O’Neill (1996: 141-146) has argued, questions of obligations should be central to any

account of justice.

This short and presumably incomplete list of the “modules” which a complete capability

theory of justice would need to comprise makes clear that a capability theory of justice is

theoretically much more demanding than the basic presupposition of the capability approach

to distributive justice, namely its claim that functionings and/or capabilities are the best

metric of justice. While much has been written on the capability approach in recent years, by

an increasing number of scholars, including philosophers, much of the philosophical work

needed for turning the open-ended capability approach into a capability theory of justice

remains to be done.

References

Anderson, E. (1999) “What is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109(2): 287–337.

Anderson, E. (2010) “Justifying the capabilities approach to justice,” in H. Brighouse and I.

Robeyns (eds.) Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press): 81-100.

Arneson, R. (2010) “Two cheers for capabilities,” in H. Brighouse and I. Robeyns (eds.)

Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press): 101-127.

Barclay, L. (2003) “What kind of liberal is Martha Nussbaum?”, SATS: Nordic Journal of

Philosophy 4(3): 5-24.

 

30

Brighouse, H., and I. Robeyns (eds., 2010) Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and

Capabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Carter, I. (2014) “Is the Capability Approach Paternalistic?” Economics and Philosophy, 30:

75-98.

Chakraborty, A. (1996) “On the Possibility of a Weighting System for Functionings,” Indian

Economic Review 31: 241–50.

Claassen, R. (2014) “Capability Paternalism”, Economics and Philosophy, 30, pp. 57-73.

Cohen, G.A. (1989) “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice”, Ethics, 99(4), pp. 906-944.

Cohen, G.A. (2008) Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University

Press).

Dworkin, R. (1981a) “What is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare,” Philosophy and Public

Affairs 10: 198-246.

Dworkin, R. (1981b) “What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources,” Philosophy and

Public Affairs 10: 283–345.

Dworkin, R. (2002) Sovereign Virtue. The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge,

MA.: Harvard University Press).

Fleurbaey, M. (2002) “Development, Capabilities and Freedom,” Studies in Comparative

International Development 37: 71–7.

Kelly, E. (2010) “Equal Opportunity, Unequal Capability,” in H. Brighouse and I. Robeyns

Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press): 61-80.

Nelson, E. (2008) “From Primary Goods to Capabilities: Distributive Justice and the Problem

of Neutrality”, Political Theory, 36(1): 93-122.

 

31

Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Nussbaum, M. (2003) “Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice,”

Feminist Economics 9 (2/3) 33–59.

Nussbaum, M. (2006) Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership,

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Nussbaum, M. (2011). Creating Capabilities. The Human Development Approach.

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Olsaretti, S. (2005) “Endorsement and Freedom in Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach”,

Economics and Philosophy, 21: 89-108.

O’Neill, O. (1996) Towards Justice and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Parfit, D. (1984) Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Phillips, A. (2004) “Defending Equality of Outcome,” Journal of Political Philosophy 12 (1):

1-19.

Pierik, R. and I. Robeyns (2007) “Resources versus Capabilities: Social Endowments in

Egalitarian Theory,” Political Studies 55 (1): 133–52.

Pogge, T. (2002) “Can the Capability Approach be Justified?” Philosophical Topics 30 (2):

167–228.

Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Rawls, J. (2001) Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press).

Richardon, H.S. (2006) “Rawlsian social contract theory and the severely disabled”, Journal

of Ethics, 10: 419-462.

 

32

Robeyns, I. (2009) “Justice as fairness and the capability approach,” in Kaushik Basu and

Ravi Kanbur (eds.), Arguments for a Better World. Essays for Amartya Sen’s 75th Birthday,

Oxford: Oxford University Press): 397-413.

Robeyns, I. (2011) “The Capability Approach,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

Edward N. Zalta (ed.) URL= http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/capability-

approach/

Robeyns, I. (2013) “The capability approach (to social justice)” in: F. D’Agostino and G.

Gaus (eds.) Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy. (New York:

Routledge): 456-466.

Schokkaert, E., (2007) “Capabilities and Satisfaction with Life,” Journal of Human

Development 8 (3): 415–30.

Sen, A. (1980) “Equality of What?” in S. McMurrin (ed.), Tanner Lectures on Human Values

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 195-220.

Sen, A. (1992) Inequality Re-examined, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Sen, A. (1993) “Capability and Well-being,” in Nussbaum and Sen (eds.) The Quality of Life,

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 30-53.

Sen, A. (2004) “Capabilities, Lists and Public Reasons: Continuing the Conversation,”

Feminist Economics 10(3), 77-80.

Sen, A. (2009) The Idea of Justice (London: Allen Lane).

Vallentyne, P. (2005) “Debate: Capabilities versus Opportunities for Wellbeing,” Journal of

Political Philosophy 13: 359–71.

Williams, A. (2002) “Dworkin on Capability”, Ethics, 113, 23-39.

Wolff, J. and A. de-Shalit (2007) Disadvantage (Oxford: Oxford University Press).